Tales of Adventurers (11 page)

Well, I had a bath and an excellent meal, cooked and served by the mestiza staff, and shared by Timoteo’s tomcat: a great, friendly, short-haired beast who stood much higher on his fore
legs than his hind, and looked like an amiable hyena. In a joint of that sort you’d have expected nothing but canned goods, but there were fresh fruits and vegetables and meat in plenty
– good evidence that somewhere across the savanna was rich country which Covadillas could well have chosen as a resting place for his spare parts.

There was no one in the drink-shop. It was between paydays. So Timoteo and I took our glasses and settled down on the terrace. It was a night of black velvet, and there wasn’t a sound in
the soft heat but the muffled thump of the electric power plant.

Timoteo felt he should apologize for making his home at the center of an empty circle. I asked who lived in the two iron huts. His staff. Two men in each hut. A stationmaster, he explained with
patient dignity, could not be expected to load and unload trucks. I protested that such a thought had never occurred to me, that my question was mere idle curiosity, that I had noticed there was no
sign of life in the huts – no light, no guitar, no woman complaining of the universe. Oh, he said, they had all gone off to collect the cars and buses from the neighborhood and see that they
got to the station in good time. It was obvious that Timoteo, as a former subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, still considered he should set an example to the weaker Latin brother. A
stationmaster was a public servant; there could be no hitch allowed in his arrangements.

After a while the thump of the power plant seemed to me to have developed a disturbing echo. I was about to suggest that we go and see if the big end had broken, when the thump became a gallop
– a real gallop, though still very distant. Timoteo listened and cheered up at once. He put his glass under his chair and took out a comb and swept the drooping gray hairs out of his mouth
until his mustache looked decently stationmasterish.

Four cavalrymen charged up into the light of the doorway, covered with dust and sweat and all in full-dress uniform, as if they’d just finished an old-fashioned battle. There were a
captain, a sergeant and two troopers, themselves and their horses bristling with firearms. So much lethal modernity was incongruous with all that pale blue and gold.

Timoteo trotted happily down the steps to meet them, and got a reception that startled him. The captain jumped off his horse and grabbed him by the shoulder.

“Are you mad?” he yelled. “Is it all right? I hold you responsible. You are responsible towards the State.”

The captain feared he was going to be blamed for something, and was taking the initiative in shifting the blame onto Timoteo. Anyone who knows these people like I do could see that.

“Of course it’s all right,” Timoteo answered solidly. “You come a little late, Captain.”

“Late? By God, we knew nothing till a telegram two hours ago! How long have you had it?”

“Since the day before yesterday,” said Timoteo. “They sent it straight from the hospital.”

The captain delivered a really eloquent speech on surgeons and hospitals and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He finished with a classic peroration on the virtues of General Covadillas –
which gave me plenty of time to work out what had happened.

The hospital, told to send Covadillas’ heart to Manzanares, had simply and sensibly sent it there. Meanwhile the Ministers had been so intent on preparations for the cathedral ceremony and
on keeping their successors out of the treasury till the accounts had been cooked, that they forgot all about the heart; and when some wretched little clerk, probably, with a salary of forty bob a
week, remembered the blessed thing and went round to the hospital to inquire, he found it had been sent off by the daily train to Manzanares like any other parcel. No guards of honor. No fuss and
bother. I repeat, it seemed to me remarkably sensible. But governments never like to do anything the obvious way.

I said so to the captain when Timoteo introduced me – as representative of all the chief papers of Europe – and the captain seemed to think my point of view fresh and delightful.
“Governments never like to do anything the obvious way,” he kept on declaring and slapping his breeches. He changed over to the most complete geniality. That’s one reason why I
love this country so much. They dramatize whatever they think they ought to feel; and then if you puncture the grand attitude – of course with the politest lace ruffles and the most delicate
touch of the point – their Spanish horse sense gets the better of them and they roar with laughter. I don’t want my anatomy distributed. They can plant the lot right here where it has
enjoyed itself, and good luck to it!

There we were, surrounded by nothingness and with a secret of our own. It was an excuse for a party. The captain, once he had cooled down, was a delightful chap, and turned out to be a
great-nephew of Covadillas. He was full of yarns about the old boy, and they rang true. The general’s character was simply incrusted with stories – generally of his unusual punishments.
That accounted for his power. Not his cruelty, I mean, but his perverted sense of humor. Be an original, and you can do anything with the Spanish-American!

The captain was patting Timoteo’s shoulder and telling him what a fine public official he was, and Timoteo liked it, and kept filling up their glasses. After thirty years in the country he
still hadn’t got rid of his Central European conviction that a stationmaster is a long way below a cavalry officer. Then they decided all of a sudden that the world would be improved by
imported lager, and went out to the refrigerator to collect bottles. The sergeant, the troopers and I stuck to wine.

When the two came rolling back with their lager, their conversation was fragmentary. The captain asked if that was the way they had sent it up; and Timoteo replied that it was, and he had
thought it best, the weather being warm, to keep it in the refrigerator. The captain said he didn’t think the surgeons had been complimentary to his great-uncle in using a plain wooden box,
and Timoteo said a wooden box was all we got anyway, and no absorbent packing in it at that.

This aroused my curiosity, and when I went out to attend to the needs of nature I had a look at Timoteo’s refrigerator. The happy pair had left the door open. As I say, we were having
quite a party. There was the wooden box, all right, just as it came from the hospital – except that Timoteo had wisely forced up the lid so that the cold could circulate round the contents.
But what surprised me was that there were no contents.

On my return I told Timoteo I had shut the refrigerator door – just in case he had left it open for any particular reason – and asked him where was the object of his lonely vigil. I
had a feeling that the captain might have taken it out in order to hold it in one hand for appropriate gestures while he made a speech to the empty kitchen.

“
Hombre!
In the box,” Timoteo replied.

“It isn’t,” I said.

The five men were on their feet in an instant, and all jammed in the doorway. Then they tumbled over their spurs into the kitchen and stared over each other’s shoulders into the
refrigerator and swore that the heart
must
be in the box. But it wasn’t.

The captain called his sergeant to attention, and asked him why he had been sitting at drink when he should have been guarding the most precious possession of the nation. The sergeant saluted
and turned to the troopers and insisted that they should repeat their orders – which, in loud military voices, they did. Timoteo, yielding to the Latin atmosphere, prophesied for us that he
would no longer be stationmaster at Manzanares, but begging his bread and lifting loads among Negroes in intolerable swamps. He was still developing the intolerable swamps, when he suddenly shut up
and went pale yellow.

He dropped on all fours, looking under the stove and the dressers, and calling:

“Tsiu, Tsiu, Tsiu!”

We stared at each other. I could feel the cold sweat outside and the wine inside trickling down, as it were, to my feet, and leaving me sober as – as a man in a nightmare.

We swooped on the yard outside the kitchen window, and Timoteo snapped on the lights. The yard was empty; but in that tenth of a second before we realized its emptiness we were overtaken by
infinity, by a vision of cause and complicated effect that could endure, I tell you, tunelessly. We saw Timoteo’s tomcat vanish, quick as the movement of the switch itself, from light into
darkness with a shadow in his mouth.

He had all the Americas before him, and night on his side. On the other hand, fine cat though he was, he couldn’t go very far with such a burden to carry.

You’ll understand that it was absolutely essential that Tsiu should not be allowed to settle down for a moment. We fanned out and advanced across the plain. We had four torches between us.
They were good enough within friendly walls, but in a blank outdoors their beams were just pool after pool of dust and stones and waving grass. They merely limited our fantastic world.

Timoteo managed to contact reality. His torch picked up a long tail, held straight and gripping the ground. Tsiu had crouched down and was about to get to business. Timoteo cautiously
approached, offering a piece of prime liver that he had grabbed from the refrigerator as we dashed out. Tsiu was interested. There was no doubt that he was interested. We stood still, waiting for
our daily life to return.

Tsiu let his master come near enough to reach out a hand. Then he skipped out of the circle of light with a little kittenish wriggle and dance, and the nation’s most precious possession
still in his mouth, saying as plainly as grace and muscle could put it:
What I have stolen, I have stolen.

The captain called us together to give a few swift orders, in a hoarse voice which kept choking on the word desecration. It was his duty to speak, and by speech he was able to relieve himself
and us. He detailed the two troopers and the sergeant to keep Tsiu on the move, while the rest of us went back to the
fonda
for weapons. Action restored us to sanity. I could even feel
sorry for Tsiu, but he should not have taken upon himself the mischievousness of the immortals.

The captain chose two rifles for the troopers and one for himself. He murmured savagely that the only army equipment his sergeant could understand was a typewriter. He was whispering to himself
all the time. Myself, I borrowed a .45 automatic – in an experienced fist there’s no more accurate weapon at close quarters – and Timoteo stuffed his pockets with fresh fish.

When we returned to the distant flicker of the torches, we found that the soldiery had successfully prevented Tsiu from breaking off the engagement. I think he didn’t want to. This was a
new and entertaining game, so he kept bobbing about just at the extreme range of vision.

At last the captain got him in the full, fair light of the sergeant’s torch, and let him have it. Tsiu sacrificed one of his nine lives then and there, and the bullet kicked up a spurt of
dust exactly where he had been standing when the captain squeezed the trigger. He streaked for the Southern Cross with nothing in his mouth, and we all ran forward to recover our trust. The beams
of the torches were wavering, of course, all over the sky and then over segments of savanna that were quite indistinguishable one from the other, and we arrived at six different positions.

The captain – as is, after all, the right of captains – insisted that his position was correct; so we joined him and began to search. The sergeant, who should have pinpointed the
right spot, had brandished his torch in excitement, and then directed it heaven knows where. Timoteo was the only one of us who had any sense. As soon as he saw that some of the party were
wandering off, eyes on the ground, quarter of a mile of nothingness from the proper area, he sat down where he was, right or wrong, and told us whenever we got impossibly far away from him.

We went over that ground for two frantic hours. I must have picked up and put down at least fifty stones, and when the battery began to run low I tried to pick up one of my own footprints. The
only landmark was a little ditch or hollow that we all agreed was very near the right spot; but when the sergeant found a similar hollow two hundred yards away, and Timoteo was sitting right
between the two, we were no longer sure which was the original.

Outside our own circle Tsiu was roaming about in one of his own. Every now and then, plaintively, as much as to say that he would like to call it all off and go home, he sung out:

“Morow!”

And his master would answer invitingly:

“Tsiu, Tsiu, Tsiu!”

At last Timoteo suggested that Tsiu was in the mood – if we all lay down and stayed quiet – to come back and find the Possession for us.

Patience was a lot to ask of desperate men, for we had little time. Dawn was not far away, and the special train from the capital would arrive soon after the sun. The captain, exhausted, lay
down by my side. He asked me what I proposed to do in case we should not recover anything presentable. I replied that I was going to hire at any price one of the cars that would be waiting for the
guests, and drive straight for the nearest frontier. I meant it, too. Americans have a lamentable habit of blaming the first available foreigner for anything that goes wrong.

His voice moaned in the darkness:

“What can you be thinking of us?”

I said heartily that it might have happened anywhere, and then, more cautiously, that there was a certain element of comedy of which only our late and revered leader could be trusted to
appreciate the full flavor– though possibly he would appreciate it more if the object of our search had belonged to someone else.

“That is unjust!” answered the captain severely, and stopped for thought.

“Unjust!” he exclaimed. “My great-uncle was very much a man! My great-uncle, if he could but see us from purgatory –” the captain began to make peculiar noises
into a tuft of grass, and I feared I should never reach that frontier “– if he could see us at grips upon the empty savanna with a cat, if he could read the agony in our hearts, my
great-uncle would … he would … O
Amigo mio,
in all hell there never would have been heard such a shout of laughter!”